The health and research sectors we work within are not neutral. We hold accountability for these truths in how we conduct our work. We name and acknowledge two of the historic and ongoing colonial harms that have shaped them:

• Unethical nutrition experiments on Indigenous children in residential schools shaped Canada’s Food Guide.
  In the 1940s and 1950s, government-funded researchers conducted nutrition “experiments” on Indigenous children without consent, denying them adequate food, using malnourishment to test dietary supplements, and later using those findings to inform the development of the Canadian Food Guide. These experiments represent one of Canada’s earliest intersections between health research and state policy built on the suffering of Indigenous children. This legacy underscores why ethical research and Indigenous self-determination must be central to how we co-develop knowledge and health policy today.
  

• The Prince Albert “Brain School” Study repeated historic patterns of colonial research under the guise of healing.
  Between 2013 and 2016, the Biocybernaut Institute, supported by Canadian partners and ethics approval from a university, conducted neurofeedback “brain training” on Indigenous children from Prince Albert schools. Participants, including 12-year-olds, were isolated in dark rooms with electrodes attached to their heads as part of untested trauma “treatments.” The project, later deemed ethically indefensible, reflects how research systems continue to sanction harmful experimentation on Indigenous Peoples while claiming therapeutic intent. Its approval within modern Canadian institutions reveals the persistent gaps in oversight, accountability, and cultural safety that reconciliation requires us to confront and transform.
  
  These acts were not isolated, they represent a broader pattern of extractive, colonial research that treated Indigenous peoples as data points rather than as sovereign Nations with rights to self-determination, knowledge, and healing.

As researchers, evaluators, and knowledge translators, we hold accountability for the ongoing legacies of our professions. Grounded in the principles of Braiding Accountability (Sasakamoose & Field, 2025) and aligned with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action, our reconciliation commitments focus on transforming the health systems we engage with through relational accountability, Indigenous governance, and decolonized research practice.

We are committed to:

• Advancing Call to Action #18: We explicitly name the health system’s colonial harms and work with Indigenous rightsholders to design ethical, community-driven models that uphold Indigenous rights to health and wellness.

• Advancing Call to Action #19: We support Indigenous data sovereignty by working towards actualizing, not performing, research and evaluation processes which align with OCAP® principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession), allowing communities to define and measure success on their own terms.

• Advancing Calls to Action #21–22: We strengthen Indigenous-led wellness and healing systems, ensuring they are recognized as legitimate health services—not “complementary” or “add-on” programs—and that funding structures reflect long-term, community-defined sustainability.

• Advancing Calls to Action #23–24: We contribute to Indigenous workforce development and co-develop training opportunities rooted in cultural responsiveness, trauma-informed practice, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

• Advancing Call to Action #57: We integrate education on the history and ongoing impacts of colonization into all staff learning, emphasizing Treaty relationships, anti-racism, and Indigenous law and governance.

We understand that reconciliation is not an outcome—it is a process of continual learning, unlearning, and accountability. At every level of our organization, we ask ourselves:

Who holds power here? Who benefits? Who decides? And how can that power be shared or returned?

Our work is based in Treaty 4 Territory, the traditional lands of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota Nations, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. We extend gratitude to the Indigenous Peoples whose lands we live and work upon, and commit to walking this path of truth and reconciliation in action—not performance.